What Are Examples of Prejudice Today?

Examples of prejudice found in modern society are the common assumptions that African Americans have greater inborn rhythmic abilities and a thicker skull, as noted in a 1995 psychology study. Types of prejudice found in modern society include those related to sex, gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, class, religion, disability and language.

Other modern-day examples of prejudice include assumptions that men are more adventurous than women, women are more emotional than men, and gay men are effeminate. Prejudice can be seen in discriminatory actions, such as wealthy-looking people receiving better service in stores, women losing out to men for promotions and police paying more attention to black teens than white teens.

A common way of categorizing modern prejudice is as implicit bias or explicit bias. For example, a tendency to describe Jews as shrewd is a type of explicit bias. Conversely, an example of an implicit form of bias is processing sets of words associating blacks and violence more quickly than groupings associating whites and violence, as found in a 1998 study.

Another type of prejudice found in the 21st century involves observations that people exposed to images and words of old age perform tasks more slowly, as noted in a 2002 study. Another example of prejudice is seen in studies where a woman is informed that men typically score better on mathematics tests than women, and she then performs more poorly than a woman not primed with that information.